Creating your P.Eng. application is a daunting process, so it’s easy to procrastinate and wait until the last minute to get started. We want to help you to be successful and stress-free while writing, so we’ve put together some tips below for your consideration.
1. Start early
This doesn’t mean starting to write early, it’s starting to plan your application process. You still need 4 years of experience, so it doesn’t make sense to start filling out your competencies right away. You will continue gaining new experiences every day as an EIT, so it’s best to write down what you’re up to as it happens, so you don’t forget key details. This will all be important for the “Situation” section when you work on competencies later.
2. Work often
Once you start early you get to benefit from working often. There’s no need to spend hours on your application every month. Set aside at least 15 minutes a week to note down what you worked on, challenges you faced, even failures or mistakes. It’s a valuable way to reflect on your personal and professional development while making incremental progress on your application.
3. Write down your experiences somewhere you can take with you
If you’re writing on company time or resources, make sure that you are working in a space where you won’t lose all your progress if you leave your job. A sudden layoff might mean you don’t get a chance to email your notes to yourself.
4. Compare your experiences to the competencies
Are your experiences matching up? If you spend time now trying to figure out what experiences you have that align with the competencies, it will make preparing your application much easier when the time comes! This prevents getting all the way to the 4 year finish line only to realize you have nothing to support some of the competencies.
By identifying gaps in your experience you can be strategic about the kinds of projects you are taking on at work to gain experience or improve in weaker areas.
5. Consider what YOUR contributions are in each experience
This application is about YOU, and how YOU fulfill every competence needed to become a Professional Engineer. Not your team, YOU.
It is extremely common to have your P.Eng. application rejected because EITs don’t focus enough on their personal contributions to what they were working on. Don’t fall into this trap!
6. Be confident, but not unrealistic
You will need to rank yourself out of 5 in all the competencies. It’s good to be confident in this process, but if you are ranking yourself 4/5 or 5/5 on every competency, that will raise red flags. 3’s are your friend, and it’s not a bad thing if your application has a few 2s or even a 1 — you are still super early in your career so be honest about where you are at. (If you truly are above a 3 in every competency and can back that claim up, we are all for going for it!)
7. Be strategic about your weaknesses
As mentioned above, a few self-rated 2s are not going to derail your application. Remember, categories have a minimum average score, and while some categories have many competencies others only have one. Make sure you’re confident in the single competency categories 4 and 5, you’ll need a minimum score of 3 in each. Category 1 has a whopping 10 competencies, so there’s more wiggle room if you aren’t confident in every area.
8. Figure out how to stay organized
Distilling a minimum of 4 years into 22 competencies isn’t easy, especially when the work you do might apply to multiple competencies. Keeping track of your thoughts and experience will save you the headache of working through the chaos when all you want is to get your application done. As Excel lovers, many EITs use spreadsheets to stay organized but spend more time copying and pasting APEGA details and formatting the columns than actually working on the application. Using a tool like PYPD keeps you organized AND focused on the high value work, rather than procrastinating by adjusting column widths.
9. Work with friends
Remember having fun working with your friends at university? You weren’t always doing the same assignments, but sometimes just being near someone who understands what you’re working on can be motivating. There are other benefits, like sharing what types of experience others are using for competencies you might be struggling with, or holding each other accountable when it’s time to write the application.
10. It’s about more than just your P.Eng. - think about your whole career
Writing down your experiences frequently will make it easier to talk about your career holistically. It’s an excellent professional development habit to check in on your goals. The time spent working on your application can do double duty. Track the best thing you did every week and your year-end performance review will be a breeze. Your leader will be impressed when you’re able to come up with thoughtful and specific improvement goals based on the insights from your reflections.
These tips are just a starting point, and there’s a lot that goes into the application that we haven’t covered here. A system like PYPD can help you to keep your application on track.